Again, please - but with a dictionary

By Letter to the Editor

It's entertaining when Augusta Commissioner Marion Williams stands up and commits verbal suicide while trying to show his command of the English language.

In a quote from The Augusta Chronicle, Marion said, "This is another trick to decipher what's fair in this government." Huh? That's one of those lines that makes everyone shut up, because they just have no idea why he said it and what it meant.

You see, trickery doesn't have any connection to deciphering. "Decipher" in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary means: "to convert into intelligible form." Oops - now that would be real trickery there, eh?

How about this definition: "to make out the meaning despite obscurity or indistinctness." These words don't apply to those "other" folks; they apply to Williams. He is obscuring lines of communication with his racial blathering. He is being divisive when he obstructs the attempts of well-meaning people with good solutions for Augusta.

I seem to remember him and his cronies taking a jaunt to Hawaii at taxpayers' expense to learn about improving government operations. Did they talk about using straightforward, short sentences that everyone can understand? Or did they just point the way to the Hawaiian-shirt shop?